


Time Comes Around

by Raaj



Category: Bravely Default (Video Game) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Bravely Second Spoilers, Gen, some horror elements, we kick right off with the major character death ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-09-12
Packaged: 2018-08-14 15:04:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8018644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raaj/pseuds/Raaj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone dies, eventually.  Edea can accept that.  But when Agnès disappears from Norende a week after Tiz's funeral, she's not sure if her friend has...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Comes Around

When Tiz had died, it seemed like the whole world had held its breath, no one quite ready to pronounce him dead.He was the Miracle Man; he had lived despite appearances before.He could...he _could_...Though he was of a more natural age to die now.Agnès herself seemed to be accepting it with grace, with an understanding of time's inevitability that tempered her grief.

 

  
At least, that’s what Edea had thought when she had seen her dear friend at the wake. They had hugged and exchanged condolences, stories of Tiz, and tearful laughter over what fun that blockhead was probably having in the afterlife–Crystalists believed instead in reincarnation, but Agnès had not been able to help the giggles when Edea described Tiz’s heaven with him being a guardian angel, having a whole slew of people whose lives he could helpfully meddle in. (“And he’ll clean people’s rooms while they’re out so everything’s neater, but they won’t know where things are when they come back…” “Oh, oh! The children  _hated_ when he did that. Olivia started cleaning just so he would stop.”)   


 

  
It wasn’t that Edea thought going back home to an empty house after the funeral would be easy on Agnès…but she was still close to Egil and all her children, and she was strong. She would be able to bear it.   


 

  
The news hit Eternia a week after Edea returned.   


 

  
Agnès had disappeared from Norende.   


 

  
She had taken Tiz’s body with her.   


 

  
Edea was near to challenging both Minette  _and_ her successor to a fight to get them to shut the slanderous gossip when Alternis clarified that the news came not from Minette’s speedy but occasionally erroneous feline network, but from Yew visiting from Gathelatio. Yew was waiting for her in the council room and in a tizzy. When Edea had finished jogging there, he’d gone back and forth on the rug enough times for his path to be visible, looking wild-eyed and stressed beyond belief.   


 

  
The events, Yew told her, were as followed: the eldest son, Cadell, had noticed Agnès missing from the house first, but had merely asked neighbors if they had seen her, thinking her out running an errand. The cottage looked perfectly ordinary, with no signs of violence. No one remembered seeing her that morning, so he went to the most likely places for her to visit. One of those was the graveyard, where the graveskeeper was beside himself due to a little detail like the robbing of  _Tiz Arrior’s corpse_ . Cadell had, rather understandably, started yelling upon learning of this, gathering more people’s attention. Tiz’s grave had been investigated; the shovel abandoned near it was one Cadell recognized, as his parents had had it for several years. He and a group of people had instantly rushed back to the Arrior house while others spread out through the town to find Agnès if she was still within the village at all. But she was not, and looking through the house revealed nothing in terms of some abduction or nefarious plot: valuables were still in place, including various gifts from Edea and Yew that were far more extravagant than anything Tiz and Agnès had ever bought for themselves over the years. The only things missing were some food, a lantern, some pg–necessities for travel.   


 

  
And then Cadell had found in the kitchen a scrap of paper that he had missed on his first look through the house, when he’d only been looking for his mother. The oversight was understandable.  _Not_ understandable was the paper’s message, written by Agnès herself to all appearances.   


 

 

  
Yew only knew the gist of the message, but apparently it was that she was fine! She was fine. Tiz was fine, too. She needed to take care of him. Somewhere. Away. She knew this wasn’t an ideal way to tell everyone, but she hoped all her children would understand and be patient.

 

  
He delivered that summary with heavy flourishes of sarcasm and an exasperated waving of the hands when they weren’t wringing themselves in worry, because obviously her children could not understand and were not being patient. Her children had scoured Caldisla and now,  _now_ , four of them had come to Gathelatio, based on accounts from Caldislan sailors of Agnès having boarded a ship bound there.

 

  
They had met with Yew two days ago to see what he could tell them. The Cavalier was not happy about how that had gone.

 

“Bran’s turned into a glacier, Garland is falling apart with worry. I don’t think Arissa spoke a word until she was threatening me about what she would do if I were keeping anything from them. As if I don’t want Agnès found as quickly as possible! Cadell is trying to keep his head and keep everyone in line, but it’s obvious to anyone this is straining him. How could it not? His father just died and his mother is–she’s–” Yew’s mouth contorted, as if he were trying to find a balance between what Agnès seemed to be doing and what he was willing to admit the once pope and a woman he still greatly admired would do.

 

  
“Taking a break from reality?” Edea suggested, because that was the most tactful wording she could think of. Judging by Yew’s grimace, that still wasn’t enough, in which case he  _really_ didn’t want to know what else she was thinking. Keeping her thoughts tactful was not a priority. Sorting through rising panic and upset to figure out what a useful course of action was. She’d figure out how to be tactful about…this…after Agnès was located in safety.   


 

  
More to the point– “You’re worried about the kids getting themselves in trouble?”

 

  
“They’ve formed a  _party_ , Edea.”

 

  
“Don’t be so dramatic. Four people don’t make a party unless they’re armed.”

 

  
Yew just gave her a look.

 

  
“…Wait, are you telling me the kids are geared for battle?”

 

  
“Bran has his pistols, and I’m sure Arissa thought she was being discreet, but Magnolia spotted some daggers in her luggage. I wouldn’t put it past her to have more, too. Garland has his staff, and Cadell isn’t armed, but given his favorite asterisk was always monk, he doesn’t need to be. If his siblings get into a fight, he’s going to end up fighting with them.”

 

  
Edea considered this for a moment. “Suddenly, I see how encouraging a woman who could scream a god’s horns off and a man who managed to fight a god while dying to have half a dozen babies  _might_ have been a bad thing.” Because the Arrior clan was perfectly mild and nice most of the time, but with all of them in a clamor right now? Totally different story. She wanted to say they were only being prepared in case something nefarious was behind Agnès’ sudden vanishing act–which she wasn’t ruling out either–but. Emotions running high? Stress levels through the roof? That sounded like a recipe for misunderstandings escalating to violence. “They wouldn’t be my godchildren if they weren’t at least half as dangerous as me, though!”

 

  
“Yes, Edea, we all know you’re very proud of having taught them to pummel,” Yew said, his tone just a few inches beyond the end of patience. He paused and took a deep breath, sounding more measured when he continued. “But yes, I’m worried about them getting in trouble. They’ve just lost their father, and whatever’s happened with Agnès, it’s worrying. They don’t need any further grief. So I came ahead of them to ask you for more resources to look for Agnès. Best case scenario, we find Agnès safe and get this whole thing worked out so that everyone can breathe easy. If we don’t find her, at least they know they’re being taken seriously…” But Yew grimaced.

 

  
Edea did too, for a second or so. If Eternia was the best lead, failing to find Agnès would be troubling. She quickly picked up her chin, answering Yew with firm confidence. “There’s no way we won’t find Agnès. I know my country like the back of my hand!”

 

  
“It’s a very bumpy hand,” Yew murmured–he’d heard this claim made before, and it was a slight overstatement given how difficult the mountains of Eternia made its maps–but he smiled a little. “Thanks, Edea. Hopefully we can set the children at ease soon.”

 

  
She nodded, her own promise, before approaching the map on the council room’s walls. “Now, there’s two ways of looking at this–either she really did go on her own, or she was made to go by someone. So it’s either a question of where Agnès would want to go, or where someone would want her to go…hm…”

* * *

  
Certain places were checked off automatically. Everlast tower, for example, was crossed off two hours after Yew had arrived, from the entrance all the way to the very inner sanctum where the Earth crystal had resided. No one had gotten the insane idea to try forcing a woman in her fifties, thirty years removed from her experience as a vestal (although Edea wasn’t sure if Agnès would ever forget how to be one, having awakened twenty crystals), to interfere with crystals again. The acolytes vowed she had never been sighted, and Edea was sure it would have been a big to-do if she had. Not only was Agnès was a well-loved figure, but there was an established earth vestal now who had ultimate authority over the earth crystal’s care–Agnès wouldn’t have been able to nonchalantly waltz through, as she had in the Wind Temple when possessed by Revenant all that time ago.

 

  
It was good that that particular kidnapping motive had been put to rest…if this was a kidnapping.

 

  
Eternia was searched by two dozen duchy officers, all of the ninja persuasion. They were to be gathering any potential info, so she was still keeping the Barras Lehr types in reserve.   Well--to be perfectly honest, if anyone  _had_ forced Agnès from her home, especially at a time like this, Edea wanted the satisfaction of beating them up for herself. And Konoe’s disciples did turn up information about Agnès: she, or else someone very like her, had been spotted moving with a man leaning heavily into her (or prodding her along, was the ninjas’ suspicions on what the witnesses had actually seen), along the eastern path to Central Command.   


 

 

Since she obviously hadn’t gone to Central Command, which would have eliminated the need for anyone to search for her, Agnès had to be at Gravemark Village. Edea was not immediately sure of the reasoning for this destination, either from Agnès’ perspective or a potential kidnapper’s…it was more out of sight? Whatever. It was a lead!

 

Yew insisted on accompanying her there, of course. Once a Pope’s Cavalier, always a Pope’s Cavalier. Even if the Pope had since relinquished her own title. Just the two of them would handle the approach; they didn’t need a whole troop of soldiers descending on the village and spooking everyone who’d holed up there.   


 

  
Gravemark Village was still largely abandoned, but there was a small collection of newer cabins built on the edge: grandchildren of the Great Plague’s victims who’d decided to reclaim their ancestral lands, newer settlers who needed inexpensive land to settle down on. When Edea had described it to her Father and Mother, the old couple had laughed, saying it was good that people were returning, and telling her she would need to start reminding people to use its original, less gloomy name soon.   


 

  
…Edea was pretty sure “Gravemark” had stuck, especially as the town was still more populated by graves than living people. But that fact made it easy to survey the newer inhabitants and determine that no one stood out as suspicious. They still had a sliver of daylight left as they approached the older, abandoned cabins. Here, they didn’t bother with pleasantries or knocking; Edea felt sure that if Agnès was being kept here, there was something shady going on, so she shouldered every door open as Yew watched on as back-up. Door after door opened to decrepit, musty cabins. Edea was starting to fall into a robotic procedure of shoving the door open, taking five paces to cover most of the cabin’s length, and seeing there was nothing unusual.   


 

  
So she was surprised, to say the least, when one door opened up on her right as she was trying to bang it open. She fell right through to the floor as two voices cried out.   


 

  
“Edea! Are you all right?”   


 

  
“Edea–AGNÈS!”   


 

  
While Edea wasn’t  _quite_ as agile as she’d been in her twenties, she still had a good reaction time and quickly rolled over to see Yew take Agnès in his arms, hugging her tightly.   


 

  
“Agnès! Are you okay? Has anyone hurt you?”   


 

  
“No no, Yew, I’m fine. I–I wasn’t expecting you. Why are…?”   


 

  
Agnès’ faltering had given Edea enough time to see that there wasn’t anyone else in the cabin coming to join the conversation. Her stomach suddenly felt heavy. This was…obviously not much of a kidnapping. So Agnès had really come here on her own? Left Norende, left that strange note, of her own accord? Then…   


 

  
Edea got back to her feet, looked around the cabin one more time, and instantly saw the body lying on the bed. Her stomach turned over. Tiz looked so peaceful, like he was just sleeping deeply…she was surprised that she couldn’t even see any decomposition yet, though maybe that was the dimness of the cabin as the last rays of light shortened. Though she should still smell it. Maybe she was just willing herself not to perceive it, because this was disturbing enough as it was.

 

  
“Agnès, this is  _not acceptable._ ” Edea said it before she could even think about things like tact and perhaps being gentle with a widow obviously overwhelmed with grief. Tiz might be the love of Agnès’ life, but he had been her lifelong friend, too.

 

  
Crystals, the kids were not going to be happy.

 

  
Yew stiffened–-Edea would bet that in his relief to find Agnès safe, he’d forgotten what else could be wrong–-and turned slowly. Edea knew the second he’d spotted Tiz–-Tiz’s  _corpse_ , because even if he somehow still looked alive he wasn’t, she knew that–-by his horrified gasp.   


 

“No, no, you don’t understand,” Agnès said quickly, grabbing Yew’s sleeve and meeting Edea’s eyes, trying to appeal to both at once. “Everything’s all right,  _please_ don’t be upset. Tiz is sleeping. He’ll wake up soon.”   


 

  
“He’s sleeping a dirt nap.”   


 

  
“Agnès, just…tell us why you think he’ll wake up?” Yew questioned, obviously trying to add some rationality to the situation. He was still holding her, but now carefully, as if he expected her to bolt if he let go.

 

  
“Because he already has. He will, in a few more minutes.” Agnès paused, pursing her lips. “I  _know_ how it sounds, you two don’t have to look at me that way. You know he’s come back before.”

 

  
“He was only dead for a few minutes that time!” Edea said. “There was a wake held!”

 

  
“Yes, I know, but– Edea!”

 

  
She’d grabbed the foot of the corpse and tugged it, hard enough that any sleeping person should have jerked it back or reacted to the pain, if not outright woken up. Tiz had done none of those things. His body was completely still. She felt sick, but she was starting to steel herself now. Things were wrong. She was going to make them right. “He is not sleeping.”

 

  
Plain, simple facts. Agnès needed to see reason.

 

  
“N-not per se, but…”

 

“Agnès.” Yew said her name soothingly, patting her shoulders. Focusing on her, and steadfastly ignoring the body in the room. “Your children are worried about you. Arissa especially. I know this has been hard on you, but don’t you want to see them? They’re in Gathelatio.”

 

  
“I-I tried to tell them not to worry,” Agnès murmured. Her face was pale in the darkness, only barely lit by the moonlight. “We wanted to figure this out first, people aren’t going to understand.  _You_ don’t understand! But just wait. Tiz will say it, and…it’ll make more sense when he explains it, I’m sure. When you see it.”   


 

  
“Agnès…” Why wasn’t she seeing the truth? Edea had no idea what more they could say, besides insisting over and over. “I know it hurts, but Tiz isn’t…”

 

  
She stopped abruptly. There were blankets shifting on the bed behind her, and Agnès and Yew had both turned their heads to look past her. Agnès looked near beatific in her relief.

 

  
Yew looked  _terrified._

 

  
Two feet hit the floor, and then a hand grabbed Edea’s shoulder as a frisson traveled up her spine at a seemingly innocuous question:

 

  
“I’m not what, Edea?”

 

  
She turned her head just enough to recognize the hand on her shoulder, the blue of the crystal shard in Tiz’s wedding band winking at her in the moonlight.

 

  
Then she, great Grand Marshal of Eternia, dropped to the floor in a faint.

* * *

  
“Maybe this is why wakes were held overnight traditionally.”   


 

“It’s an awfully good reason.”   


 

  
“Though I can’t imagine–”   


 

  
“GHOST!” Edea yelled as she came to and sat up, cutting through the discussion that had been going on around the edge of the bed.   


 

  
Tiz waved at her. “Not ghost. Zombie, at the very least.”   


 

  
Agnès frowned, elbowing him mildly. “Not even that. Don’t joke.”   


 

  
“Sorry, sorry.” Tiz lay a gentle kiss on top of Agnès’ hair, and then cracked a faint smile at Edea. “And sorry I scared you.”   


 

  
Edea stared at him. Mild, nice, still lovey-dovey with Agnès after the better part of their lives spent together–Tiz seemed like just his plain old ordinary self. “You were dead,” she said slowly. “Just now. You were lying here like a stiff.”   


 

  
He grimaced. “Yeah, we’re…still trying to figure out the ‘stiff’ issue.”   


 

  
Now that she was really looking at him in the light of the candles someone had lit, his color was pretty bad. And as romantic as it was he and Agnès could still be loving at the moment, he was leaning into her, Agnès supporting his weight as discreetly as possible. “Okay, so, what’s going on? You might not be dead now, but you don’t look too good either.”   


 

  
“He’s only revived under the moonlight,” Yew said. “Not far from how Altair could only appear at night. The heightening of SP in the atmosphere from the moon’s rays influences…”   


 

  
He trailed off under Edea’s incredulous stare. “You’re nerding out.”   


 

  
“It was the best way he could deal with me, uh, waking up,” Tiz said, laughing sheepishly as Yew ducked out of the conversation by writing more in his notebook. “But yeah. The start of the night is the roughest, my body’s stiff all over. I’ll be better later on.”   


 

  
“Don’t just write it off,” Edea told him sternly–a response ingrained from too many fighters trying to downplay injuries. “You’re in Eternia now, maybe there’s something we can do to help.” A thought occurred to her. “Oh, that’s why you two came here! But why didn’t you tell Cadell what was actually going on? All the kids–they would have wanted to know you’re alive. Kind of. I mean, hey, I would have liked to know!”   


 

  
“I…didn’t actually know what was going on at first,” Agnès confessed. “That first night was terrifying, I couldn’t think straight through most of it.”   


 

  
“Tiz is usually the straight-thinker.” Edea glanced at the man for his explanation.   


 

  
It was incredibly succinct: “I started my night by waking up in my own coffin.”   


 

  
Yew’s pen scratched to a halt in whatever note or theory he was writing. His shocked eyes looked to Edea’s. They hadn’t realized until now the implication that Tiz had accidentally been buried alive. Well…accidentally  _revived_ while buried, more like, but all the same…   


 

  
“I wasn’t much use to anyone after that,” Tiz said ruefully.   


 

  
Tiz and Agnès took turns telling what had happened that night. Tiz had woken up in a box under feet of dirt and had done what anyone would do in a locked chamber–pound and yell for help–before realizing exactly what kind of locked chamber it was, that no one would be able to hear him, and that each breath meant less oxygen in the box.   


 

  
It seemed like a miracle now that he and Agnès had both had shards of her pendant set in their wedding rings, but even if they had been set for sentimental value, they had come in handy long before at times when one or the other had to travel. So it’d only taken him a couple minutes to remember the connection, and then Agnès had  been  woken by the voice of her deceased husband  begging  her to please, please, please wake up and help him–   


 

  
“The first time, I rolled over and tried to shut his voice out. I thought I was just imagining it,” Agnès said in a small voice.   


 

  
“You did listen though,” Tiz said.   


 

  
Yes, eventually she had realized the voice was coming specifically from her finger–her ring finger. The stone atop it, normally blue, was near-black from the darkness Tiz was in. She’d hurried to the graveyard on her own, still in disbelief that Tiz  _could_ be alive, thinking she had to be imagining things, but unable to ignore the possibility that he might actually be alive and slowly suffocating to a new death.   


 

  
“She blasted the first few feet of dirt with aeroga since it was still loose,” Tiz said. “Then it started to sound too close, so I told her to stop and use the shovel.”   


 

  
“Sir? You’re a little too calm about this,” Yew said.   


 

  
Edea had to agree. “If I woke up and found out I was buried alive, I would need therapy afterward.” And Tiz probably did too, at some point…but she wouldn’t say that yet.

 

“My therapy is being outside boxes,” Tiz deadpanned. “But I’m also making myself sound a lot calmer than I was at the time, trust me.”

 

  
“He was, ah, closed off, unable to speak for a while when I finally got him out,” Agnès agreed, resting her head against his shoulder. “We went home, of course, and I helped him draw a bath and get some hot food inside him to help calm down with. Eventually he could talk again, and we were trying to figure out what had happened and why, if the doctor had been mistaken or if something else was going on, and then–then–”   


 

  
“It was dawn. I felt weak for a few minutes and passed out.” After a second, Tiz amended: “Dropped dead again.”   


 

  
“Does this happen every day,” Edea asked, horrified, “You wake up because hurrah, moon! SP!, and then it goes away and you  _die again_ ?”   


 

  
“I–I’ve been lasting a little longer every night, I think, but yeah.”   


 

  
“If you’re staying awake longer, maybe your body’s starting to store up SP for some reason? Because of the hourglass or… and you barely had enough that night, so you wouldn’t have woken before…”   


 

  
“I’m amazed you’re actually trying to make sense of Tiz’s life,” Edea told Yew. “Unlife. Whatever it is now.”   


 

  
They were very possibly  _all_ going to need therapy for this. Edea took a breath and thought. Events were starting to fall a little more into place. Tiz had revived in a coffin, both Tiz and Agnès would have been trying not to fall apart for each other, and they had just barely started trying to rationalize what had happened and figure out what to do when Agnès had a corpse in her house for the second time. She wouldn’t have known yet that he would wake up with the moon’s return.   


 

  
Edea winced. “Oh,  _Agnès._ I wouldn’t have been thinking straight at that point either.”   


 

  
Agnès smiled tremulously. “I thought for some time that I had…somehow imagined all of him waking up. I wanted to get Cadell, Garland, anyone, just to have someone else beside me. But I also thought…they’re going to want him buried again, and what if he wakes up again, because he already did the once? I couldn’t let that happen. So I took Tiz and left. And it was quite sudden, a-and I realize now that that letter probably wasn’t a good one, but I just couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t. So here we are. I was hoping there might be something in Eternia that could help him? So I snuck us both on board a ship by pretending he was a little drunk and fast asleep.”   


 

  
Edea laughed, then chewed her lips guiltily. “Nah, it is pretty funny,” Tiz said. “I’m still amazed she got away with it. She probably used her best disapproving voice and made the sailors afraid they’d be scolded next if they stayed close.”   


 

  
“Oh!” He got another light elbow for that before Agnès looked at Edea pleadingly. “I know this probably isn’t something your healers have ever seen before, but–”   


 

  
“They’re smart,” Edea said. “They know how to keep things to themselves, and they’ll help figure out what can be done for Tiz so he’s not… so weird. I’m sorry, Tiz, I don’t know what the medical terminology for this would be, it’s just  _really weird_ . But we are going to help.”   


 

  
“Tactful as always,” Yew said.  Edea knew not to take him seriously.   


 

  
“Yeah, well, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. I mean, I’m guessing this was somehow caused by the Celestials’ interventions in his life before, but if that’s the case, that was over thirty years ago. When are we going to known it’s worn off? …Everyone dies eventually.” True, they still had a good number of years left, with any luck, but they weren’t getting any younger. “How do we know what to do the next time Tiz dies?”   


 

  
“Actually, I already thought about that,” Tiz said. “If you’re convinced I’m dead and gone? Skip the box. Cremate me. I’m pretty sure even SP can’t accidentally bring me back from that.”   


 

  
Well, good to see that even being stuck in a weird loop of revival didn’t stop Tiz from thinking ahead. Edea nodded and then sighed, standing up. “Okay. So we are going to get you to one of the healing towers. But first thing’s first–now that no one’s burying Tiz, you two need to talk to your kids.”   



End file.
